Electronic data is commonly used to store important information such as healthcare and financial data. As the amount of electronic data has dramatically increased over the past decade, so have the number of data breaches, resulting in billions of private records being stolen. For this reason, much research has gone into improved methods of securing data.
Current methods for protecting data generally utilize sophisticated encryption schemes and/or multi-factor authentication in order to ensure that only authorized users gain access to the data. These current methods “trigger” on “who” is accessing the data and the current methods are typically constructed and deployed as “layers” of security starting potentially as true physical layers at the perimeter and culminating as encrypt/decrypt schemes. The current methods for protecting data generally have the disadvantage of (1) making data hard to get to, (2) making data difficult to utilize without a key, and (3) complicating access for authorized users by breaking data apart, storing the data in pieces at different locations, and distributing assembly instructions to authorized users.